Poetry is what gets lost in translation-Robert Frost

March 13, 2014

Little Failure

At first glance, it would seem a bit surprising that Gary Shteyngart would write a memoir, Little Failure (2014) being that he’s only 42 and has only written three novels (albeit three excellent novels: The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story). But after reading it, I can see why he chose to write a memoir since he is obsessed with identity, his parents, and success. That being said, it is also very funny and enlightening as to what the Russian immigrant experience was like in the 70s and 80s before glasnost and thawing of the cold war. Shteyngart is one of my favorite contemporary writers, so I would have read anything by him, because it will be guaranteed to be entertaining no matter what the subject. And the subject is himself, which is really the subject of all of his previous novels as he acknowledges in the memoir. I think he doesn’t really spend enough time on how he made the transition from weird immigrant kid to New York hipster in high school, but I guess the underrated impact of peers in adolescence is the answer that he explains through his exploits with rich kids in abandoned townhouses and apartments in Manhattan. He also goes to college in hipster heaven, Oberlin in Ohio. There are so many great passages that reflect his incisive humor and self-mocking:

“Though I was born Igor-my name was changed to Gary in America so that I would suffer one or two fewer beatings…”

“”Twenty-two years later, a middle-aged man who is also the kindest of their lot, will throw the book on the floor, fine. To spit on it, sure. But to do both? This is not a Bollywood movie.”

“The next Shabbat and almost every Friday thereafter, I am brought into the tiny yellow building of Young Israel, where I can rock and sway along the cheaply attired but kind men (the women are sent to a balcony above us) who seem to accept me and don’t think I’m crazy when I accidentally spit out something in Russian or casually molest the English language with my tongue.”

“The next year I get the present every boy wants. A circumcision.”

“On most days I have my head so far up my family’s ass I can taste borscht.”

“Would it be outrageous to say that at this point in my life alcohol is the best thing to have happened to me? Absolutely it would be outrageous. Because there’s also pot.”

On Oberlin’s admissions selectivity: “’That level of selectivity is so embarrassingly nil.’ I have come to the right place.”

“Also the food served in the dining hall, a disingenuous attempt at beef au jus, a hairy salad of destroyed lettuces, a postapocalyptic taco…”

I eagerly await Shteyngart’s next book, if nothing else, hopefully it will be more of the same.